In addition to creating specific masculine disarray, the inevitable decline of men's physical utility in a tertiary and digital society is actually erasing one of our species’ most immemorial traits: the difference between the sexes. As it is accompanied by the rise in power for women in domains formerly exclusive to men,1 it has become increasingly difficult to distinguish between men and women, right down to the very clothes they wear. Yet if most men no longer have any physical role to play in our explored and domesticated world, can they still truly remain men? Can women still hold any desire for the sedate office workers that so many men have become? Can our sexual alterity biologically survive this physical and mental interchangeability between men and women?

Those questions may sound controversial, for one could instantly contend, firstly, that they are based on the assumption that desire can arise only from gender differentiation, and secondly, that we should in fact be delighted with the growing similarity between men and women, as a decisive step toward closing the gender gap. In a premonitory essay, French feminist Élisabeth Badinter was already rejoicing in the convergence of the sexes, convinced that it heralded the end of the war between the sexes and the birth of a new transgender humanity:

She also writes: